Syntext Serna Free is an XML editor offering WYSIWYG content authoring functionality for non-commercial purposes, including personal use, documenting open-source projects, and education. It is available on various operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, MacOsX, and SunSolaris.
To render documents in print-like appearance, Serna employs XSLT and XSL-FO. This approach provides many opportunities for document rendering, such as profiled views, localized generated content, document composition from multiple chunks, in-line attribute editing, and many more. Serna offers excellent support for DITA 1.1 and comes with an integrated DITA Open Toolkit. With flexible visualization of DITA maps and topics and the ability to resolve referred content and local conrefs with in-place editing, DITA authoring becomes more straightforward.
Serna Free has several key features that make it stand out among its peers. Firstly, it is available for Microsoft Windows (2000, XP, Vista), Linux, Mac OS X, and Sun Solaris/SPARC. Secondly, it has built-in support for all popular document types such as DITA, Docbook, XHTML, TEI P4, NITF, and others. Thirdly, it offers on-the-fly document validation against XML Schemas along with context-sensitive element help.
Fourthly, it has entity and XInclude in-place editing with drag-and-drop and on-the-fly validation. Fifthly, it has UNICODE support and multilingual spell checking. Finally, its user interface is localized into several languages, including Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Igbo, Italian, Norwegian, Russian, Swedish.
Overall, Serna Free is a must-have software for anyone who needs to work with structured content efficiently. Its intuitive UI, DITA support, and wide range of features make it stand out from the rest.
Version 4.1: Added drag`n`drop between opened documents, added a number of new hot keys, DITA-related bugs fixed